The Fallen
by Elemnestra Aethelflaeda
Summary: The war held far too many truths for one story to cover, or to be true for all people simultaneously. But the dead remain the dead, even if what they are said to have died for has changed. And remembrance also remains. For Anzac Day, 2011
1. Part One

_**Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises. This includes not only the setting, but also any song lyrics that may have somehow found their way into this via osmosis, or something. The poetry is from Laurence Binyon's 1914 poem "For the Fallen" (or, more specifically, the Ode of Remembrance). **_

**A/N: For Anzac Day, 2011. **

* * *

><p><em><strong>The Fallen<strong>_

**[They went with songs to the battle, they were young.]**

The vids showed them young and strong. Standing straight and tall in their new uniforms, proud and courageous. Ready to fight for something they believed in, aglow with the fervour of that belief. They were recruited, in twos and threes and fours, from families and towns and ranches, swayed by rhetoric and tales of glory and honour, and then enlisted.

And before not very long at all they were entrusted with weapons and uniforms and all the trappings of a life in the military. Regiments marched down the main street of their hometowns, and in the early days those streets were lined with people noisily supporting and encouraging. They were given training, and sent off to the battlefields to fight for the cause they were ordered to believe in.

But the training was not enough, too brief and too minimal. The raw recruits mostly survived only by luck and the skin of their teeth. And more recruits were needed, and the families that had remained behind dwindled as brothers and sisters and children left their homes. There were no longer any parades, the few volunteers skulking almost shamefacedly to the transport ships.

The streets were still lined with watching eyes, but they were eyes that betrayed weary, downtrodden hopelessness. They did not cheer their families to victorious battle against their oppressors. It was a silent farewell to those they never thought to see again.

The numbers of enlisted diminished as the Rim worlds turned away, unable to face the war that drained their spirit and stole away their loved ones. Conscription did nothing to improve morale, nothing to regain that initial glow of courageous belief.

The recruits, volunteers and conscripts alike, aged fast in the battlefields. They were shipped from world to world, from one bloodied fighting ground to another, from one barracks created out of the remnants of a desolated and abandoned town to the next. They lost their innocence and naivety and faith and often their lives.

But in the vids they are still young. They had been recorded by news outlets, and the propaganda machines, and families farewelling their children and spouses and siblings. And no matter what happens to the recruits themselves, their images remain unchanging and indelible, caught in those few handfuls of frames.

Enthusiastic. Passionate. Alive.

Mal thinks he might even still have a copy of one of those vids somewhere.


	2. Part Two

_**The Fallen**_

**[Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.]**

The valley wasn't green, but it would have been once. Not now; by now the soldiers had started digging in, and the dull colours of dirt and mud had replaced any hint of green. The landscape was depressing, Mal decided. He may have spent most of his life on a ranch where the dominant colours were those of earth and the overriding impression was of dusty, ochre dirt, but the piece of land here surely deserved to be called depressing.

Maybe, Mal thought, it was because of all the armed men and women flooding the valley, turning it into a hive of activity full of busily toiling limbs. Or because he could already see the shapes of the trenches and the rudimentary shelter they would provide, see where the enemy would most likely attack first, guess where they probably already lurked, waiting, and envision how the ground would look when it was covered in dead bodies. Or because whatever natural beauty the place had ever possessed had vanished beneath the growing defensive structures and preparations for war, and he had no time and no inclination to look for where it might have gone, had it ever been there at all. Or maybe he was just tired.

Mal frowned out across the muddy brown expanse of the valley. Exhaustion sounded like a good excuse for all this introspective reflection. Corporal Alleyn might not entirely believe him, and let him know as much through small but significant movements of her eyebrows and a marginally altered quality to her nominally-respectful "Yes, sir," but the exhaustion bit was true enough. He muttered something safely incomprehensible but expletive-laden under his breath and turned away to issue orders. Although first he would need to locate his squad, and the to-be-expected additions to it, amongst the zigzagging paths that would hopefully soon be trenches.

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><p>An explosion that sounded directly overhead sent Mal sprawling into the dirt on pure instinct. A second later, a brief shower of dirt clods rained down on top of him. He stayed motionless, scowling darkly at the ground, before clambering to his feet and brushing off the worst of the dirt.<p>

Yeah. Trenches? Not the best defence from aerial attacks.

Unfortunately, it was all they had now. The shuddery, erratically sparking forcefield generators that Mal had never expected to work at all had finally given out not more than a day ago. And with the generators gone, the rest of their defences were falling as well. They were holding out, hanging on, gripping to the chance of life with their teeth, and their nails, and everything else they had, and perhaps Mal should just abandon that metaphor and get on with his job. Distracting himself with internal ramble would never help.

And the walls of the trenches, that never _had_ quite ended up being completed, not when every day they collapsed a little, even without the persistent tremors of gunfire and artillery, and had to be forever restructured because the sides fell in and had never been all that stable to begin with…but telling himself all the ways in which he might suffocate in piles of dirt if the walls collapsed on him, like had happened to Robson and the others, wasn't going to get Mal anywhere either.

He glared at the nearest wall, leaking small flurries of dust unrepentantly down its sides, and then hunched half over, crouching with his arms over his head, as another explosion sounded. Further away, machine guns chattered. Mal pushed to his feet, and started to run again, awkwardly, along the crooked line of the trench. There was no one in this section, a mistake, because their defence was breaking and really all the Alliance needed to do was wait. And there should be people here, no matter how spread thin they were, but there weren't.

And – and Mal froze, lurching to a standstill as he rounded the latest corner at speed to stumble, spin and almost fall in the effort not to plant a boot in the middle of a mutilated stomach with its guts hanging out, or an arm with no apparent owner. And no one would be walking away from this spot, or moving from it at all except to the industrial-quality incinerators they had been told to use, because graves were too labour-intensive, took too many men away from their duties. And what did that say about the way the war was headed, that even a squad on burial duty was too many men away from the front?

Mal swallowed, and stepped steadily across the stretch of trench that he couldn't look at too carefully until the dismembered limbs were behind him. And then Mal ran until he reached Chidrawi's abandoned squad to round them up and send them back to man the trenches and fill the gap in their front lines.

It was only when he relocated Corporal Alleyn, hunkered down beside her, that he realised someone had finally managed to shoot down that automated drone taking pot-shots from above their heads. And he couldn't help but think, to _wish_, that maybe this was a turn in the right direction for once. It could only be a small turn, the tiniest shift in the currents of battle that changed their hopes from absolute, certain doom for all of them to a slim chance for _something_. But Mal planned to make it do something worthwhile for as long as it lasted.

And maybe then, finally, something could come out of all this. Nothing new or beautiful, nothing like peace, could ever come from the unmoving, twisted bodies of young soldiers, or the contorted, terror-ridden expressions of shell-shock. But maybe they could find something to cling to.

And maybe that something could look a little like hope.


	3. Part Three

_**The Fallen**_

**[They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,]**

We haven't left our homes, or gone to defend our beliefs with weapons and the strength of our arms and our wills. Our families have left us instead. We remain. Watching our friends leave, with tension filling our stomachs. Our husbands, children, siblings, all disappearing into the transports that will carry them, _have_ carried them, further away than they have ever been before. To such distances that we will never be able to reach them, will never be able to see them, touch them, help them, comfort them ever again. Only if they come back to us can we try to save them, from themselves or from outsiders.

But no one has come back. Not even the injured or crippled, as we know there must be, have been given back to us. The people we love, whom we would give our lives for but cannot whilst we are separate from them, have vanished into the black hole of a war-torn verse. Living where we always have, we cannot know what they suffer any more than we can alleviate their pain. Letters are brief, censored, and cut short when they arrive at all. And when they stop coming, we can't know if the missives were lost or destroyed, or if they were never written because there is no one left to write them.

We don't know what it must be like, out there in the battlefields. We are left to our imaginations. Visions of faraway terrain that we have never known but can now see all too clearly swim before our mind's eye, desolate landscapes ravaged by violence. Painful foretellings of loss and grief haunt our nights and our days alike until we go through our daily work as sleepwalkers.

We see, again and again, the plasma bolts lashing out, frying and burning and killing, or the unexpected explosions that end in scattered and mutilated limbs. We envision against our wills the accidents, the trails of miscalculations, the lives thrown needlessly away to fulfil some risky gambit. Knives and sharp fragmented shrapnel tearing into tanned skin, blood flowing unstaunched and gushing from deep gashes, the bullet that can't be dodged, all spin through our minds.

And the worst of it is that we know with a bone-deep certainty, that whatever horrors our wearied minds dream up and linger on with morbid fear, they are nothing to what our loved ones experience in truth. We don't know what they go through, or where they are, don't know if we will ever see them again, and don't know if we can help them if we do. We don't know what has become of them.

We don't know what has become of the war, either, but we care less, far less, about the grand aims and schemes of the generals who stole away those we love. But the war is not going well. Our families are still missing, and we have no more to give, and are getting nothing in return but hurried and impersonal notifications of "We regret to inform you that...".

And we can do nothing. Nothing but try to prevent voluntary enlistments, to protest the introduction of conscription, the consignation of another generation to hell. We keep the ranches operational, as best we can when all help, hired or otherwise, has gone to the bloodied battlefields. We keep the hearth warm through the winter, try to continue our lives burdened with the knowledge that our loved ones may never again do so.

One day the war will be over, and we don't know what will happen. But it must, it must, be better than this. One day our families will come home, and we will see them, and until that day we can do naught but hope they come home alive.

Until that day, we wait.


	4. Part Four

_**The Fallen**_

**[They fell with their faces to the foe.]**

They've lost, and they know they've lost, are resigned to it. There is no possible way to win. They've thought of every tactic and strategy, spinning them through overwrought minds endlessly, as if another repetition will yield a different outcome. It has become the unwanted pastime of anyone sufficiently sane or sober, and everyone knows the answer to the silent question. They cannot succeed.

There are too many obstacles, from far too many directions. No matter where they turn, no matter where they retreat, or where they advance, there is always a threat. Nowhere is free from the desperate attempt to survive despite all odds; the frontlines are everywhere and whatever direction they face their backs are to another battlefield. They are too few, too poorly armed, too ill-trained, too _tired_, to ever win.

And the recruitment spiels had never mentioned this, had never said anything about the mud and the blood and the tears. The stories never seem quite real. And this is surely not glory, but there must have been at least some truth to those stories because this looks more like death every day.

But they keep fighting regardless. They keep fighting for days, weeks, well beyond when their endurance should have given out. Surrounded by death and gore and mud and not nearly enough food, they persevere with no hope of reward, no hope of last-minute salvation. There will be no reinforcements appearing in the nick of time.

There is no hope found in anything, not even the concept of surviving another day. Another day's survival only means another day's fighting. The longer they go on, the more pain and hardship they will endure.

But they don't give up, and maybe they've forgotten how. Anyone who wanted surrender had done so, to the hunger and grief and terror and pain. To surrender would be easy; to simply give in and get whatever mercy came from death. Those who remain fight, go through the motions, although there's no sense in it. There's no sense in anything now, and they have no definable reasons for anything, no belief in anything but standing by each other, and they may as well end the way they started.

But they'll never any of them be able to again be who they once were, even if they live. Especially if they live.


	5. Part Five

_**The Fallen**_

**[They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:]**

History repeats itself. And as we relive our lives, our pasts, how can we not but remember those who were with us last time? The last time, when we swore we would never again, never let ourselves in for anything like this again; when we promised we would never again be so naive. We thought we had learnt, thought we knew better than to involve ourselves in another war.

We were bitter and disillusioned, cynical and jaded and weary. And yet we still turn the future into the past and history into a circle, and turn around and jump again blindfolded into trouble. Incurable recidivists of war, it seems we can't help ourselves. We know how it goes, the endless pattern we will never be able to forget, because it has woven itself into our core and we cannot ignore it.

The 'verse always comes around again to where it once was. Everything happens again, the same events in a different time, different place, with different people. And it is the people we remember. They who were there with us, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, huddled together beneath rubble and ruin, picking their way over mutilated remains of former comrades. Dead and alive, crippled and infirm and insane, we remember all of them, or as many of them as we can bear. We carry the memories of the dead with us, so that they are not forgotten, and because we cannot forget.

Those who died will never grow older. They will never face the itch of a phantom limb, or the ache of an old scar. They will never again face the disgust of the Core-world citizens, the scorn and utter disregard. They won't go back to back-breaking work with no reward, or to the pity or the painful patronising of those who didn't fight.

They will never wake in the middle of the night, sweating, panting, fingers reaching desperately for a weapon. They will never be unable to sleep, unable to even close their eyes for fear of what they will see there, projected onto the backs of eyelids. They will never return to the places of their birth only to be shunned and ignored. They will never be steadfastly, deliberately and unrelentingly prevented from finding a place in their own towns. They will never return to the places of their birth.

They will never again see their homes, or the night sky's constellations, or the darkness of space. They will never again see their families, or their sweethearts. Many of them will never see a grave, far less a gravestone.

They will never grow older. They will never have children; never hear the squalling of a newborn, or watch them grow, or teach them to read, to ride a horse, to name the planets the children may never see, or the stars in the sky. They will never raise a family. They will nevermore have a life. No more opportunities. No more second chances.

Their deaths did nothing, solved nothing, and gained nothing. They died not for a cause, in the end, and not for the generals in far-off ships; they died for us. They died alongside us, if not so that we might live, then so we would not be alone in death. And if we throw our lives after theirs, we will achieve nothing.

We have seen it all before. We have suffered it all before. The knowledge is ingrained. But against all reason, against every rational bone in our bodies, we follow in the footsteps we trod all those years before.

History repeats itself.

But maybe, we think, maybe this time we can change it.


	6. Part Six

_**The Fallen**_

**[Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.]**

Mal doesn't take a word the recruiters say as truth. He has, by now, learnt better. He can't help but listen, though, to the lies they dress up in glamour and glitz and finery. Ugly reality has been spun into the glimmering gold of illusory beauty. Mal doesn't know how they do it, how the recruitment officers from both sides turn cold death into shining hope. But he knows that he doesn't care for it.

Zoe wouldn't laugh at him if Mal ever lets slip that he thinks the use of the dead to spice up the recruitment speeches, to entice volunteers to the army, to be a desecration. He suspects that Wash might, even if only for the first moment before he caught himself, or realised Mal wasn't joking.

The recruiters recite their spiels to the impressionable young folk of the Rim who hadn't been alive to hear them the last time, twisting the memory of the dead so that their wakeful spirits seem to beckon new generations to the cause. Those alive today must fight to preserve their very right to do so. They are needed now to ensure that all those thousands of lives already lost have not been sacrificed for nothing, or so the dead seem to say through the mouths of the recruiters. Help the 'verse to find freedom, they say, and young men and women start to believe they can, all over again.

And they enlist, signing away their lives to a cause they won't ever really understand, a cause that will only ever grow more abstract as the people around them start dying, even as they more and more need something to which they can cling. And it's a cause that will have been implanted in their minds by the recruiters. A cause that, whether they understand it or not, they _believe_.

Mal starts to think that the Shepherd was right, and belief really is the strongest force there can be. It just isn't going to save many lives. Belief is what starts the wars, not what ends them. And the recruiters are giving it away free to anyone who cares to listen.

And sure, what they're saying is a change from the constant, unending stream of condemnation and invective that had come the Browncoats' way from the Alliance. But the dead are dead, and it's best to leave them that way. They mightn't deserve the ill-wishing of all the pro-Unification folk, but it can't hardly affect them now.

What the recruiters are saying, that's another matter.

Because the dead weren't the shining, glorious heroes they're being made out to be. They really weren't. They were just folk. Ordinary men and women, doing the best they could to stay alive.

Placing one foot in front of the other, because walking backwards wasn't an option.

There were moments of heroism, brief sparks that flared and were put out. But they were not heroes. Never heroes, which is just a fancy word for someone who gets other people killed.

They were just regular folk, doing more than regular folk should ever need to do. And Mal will defy anyone who dares to say differently.


	7. Part Seven

_**The Fallen**_

**[At the going down of the sun and in the morning,]**

The questions are endless; whispered in dusky twilights on border worlds, discussed half-drunk in pubs, shouted by hecklers at meetings, spreading across the verse via the newswaves. But they all boil down to one simple, plaintive query:

_Why?_

They ask, as if the answer is as simple as the question, as if asking the question can absolve them of any guilt they feel, or pain, or despair. They ask as if the answer can be only the response that they desire, or as if they believe it can never be answered with truth but only with lies and propaganda, or not at all. And they ask it anyway, regardless of whether or not they will be given an answer, or an answer that makes sense, or that can be applied to themselves.

_Why?_

And, the extension of the thought:

_Why should we risk our lives for dead people, from a planet we've never heard of, and a bunch of terminal crazies?_

Because, comes the answer, your life will be at risk anyway. The 'verse will be pulled into the ruinous maelstrom of war, and nowhere will be a safe haven, and one day we will all die. And you can die on your knees, on your back, stretched out on the floor begging; or you can turn, set your feet, and stand your ground and die standing.

And either way is death, cold and merciless and without end. But only one way lets you have a choice, flimsy and illusory though it may be. Choices are not to be discarded, because a day will come when you have none. There will come a day when everyone has lost everything, and there is nothing left in your life but the darkness of midnight, no joy, no hope, no life but a mindless existence. And that day might come even without a war, and if you close your ears and eyes and mind and let the Alliance continue as it wills, perhaps it has already come.

So why risk your life? Because some things are worth fighting for; and one of them is the future.

(..._and there must be a flaw somewhere in that logic, but it is not anything they can see from this angle, and they have been left no other place to stand..._)


	8. Part Eight

_**The Fallen**_

**[We will remember them.]**

Unification Day has always been the most obvious reminder of the war, of what they lost. And so every year Mal finds himself a bar full of folk most likely to pick a fight with him, so he can try to forget. It never works. Ducking punches, and throwing chairs or pool cues or glasses of cheap alcohol, he never manages to lose himself in a fight for long. And Zoe berates him for trying, or at least for how he goes about it, but she is polite enough to do so in silence, communicating enough with her eyes for him to feel defiantly shamed. And Mal never does manage to forget properly, on U-Day, never for more than a handful of seconds at a time. But he always does the exact same thing the next year. He might be too proud to admit it, but Mal thinks that he just doesn't know what else to do.

He remembers in his nightmares, when he sees twisted, mutilated bodies, torn limbs and entrails falling on the wet, muddy ground. He remembers, late at night, unable to see anything but darkness lit up by muzzle flashes, and signal flares, and distant explosions highlighted by desperate screaming. He remembers when someone, usually Jayne, is foolish enough to bring it up. And he can see the bodies gunned down, or lying malnourished and diseased on the verge of death, so close that he couldn't always say when they slipped over.

But he remembers at the strangest times. When Simon watches his sister playing with Kaylee, and Mal can't help but recall seeing that self-same look in his eye on Private Hollis when he talked of his family. Or when someone is selling dog meat at the docks, and Mal could swear he could smell the food that Corporal du Morne used to conjure up out of scraps and still have everyone's mouths watering. When Jayne is drinking, singing out of tune and loudly and crudely, and Mal can almost hear a whole gorramn regiment singing along with him in the background, happy and bright and only slightly slurring their words.

Mal hasn't been back to the Valley, or even to Hera. He doesn't know anyone who has. He doesn't need to revisit the place. He has nightmares enough as it is, and there are surely no answers to be had from the ruined hillsides. No one is left there that he needs to go back.

There are no memorials for the dead of the Independent forces. No statues of gleaming bronze, and no names carefully inscribed in smooth marble. There is nothing but succinct paragraphs in the histories, impersonal and remote. Nothing has ever been built for the communities to honour their dead, to record their names and their lives and their deaths in the permanence of stone, and no government committee will ever support the notion.

But as someone once said, a person can never leave Serenity. Only learn to live there.

Mal doesn't need government-approved lumps of commemorative rock to remember the dead.

_Lest we forget._


End file.
